Re: nonstandard names for characters & reencoding

[Berthold Horn <bkph@ai.mit.edu>]

At 02:03 PM 6/17/98 +0400, Vladimir Volovich wrote:

>Some type1 fonts have nonstandard names for some characters. An
>example is /Ng vs /Eng, but there are a lot of other examples
>(including funny ones, e.g. /quilsinglleft instead of /guilsinglleft;
>/numero instead of /afii61352, etc, etc, etc).

>Fontinst is able to deal with this: if e.g. it sees that there is no
>/Ng in the AFM, it can use /Eng when creating vpl file.

>But it is not sufficient to use only virtual fonts (?): we also should
>use ReEncodeFont with some .enc file. But how can one specify there
>variants of glyph names? It is simply impossible to create a separate
>enc file for each font out there, because there are a LOT of them with
>various differences and variants. Maybe, an extension to dvips is
>needed to be able to specify there variants for some character names?

Well, we are not the first to run into this problem.  With OpenType
coming up and ATM having to deal with Unicode in Windows NT,
there has been some thought put into standardizing these names.
In fact Adobe has published a list of Unicode to glyph name
relations (yes I know character != glyphs) and `corporate use
subareas' agreed upon by Apple, MS, Adobe, MonoType
and some others.

If you want a Type 1 font to work in Windows NT (and multi-lingual
version of Mac OS 8.2) it better use those names.

The URL of the `official' glyph name list:

http://www.adobe.com/supportservice/devrelations/typeforum/glyphlist.txt

Of course, this doesn't solve the problem with fonts from
other vendors who have not always followed the Adobe name
conventions....

Because of corporate warfare, MS has been using different
names in its TT fonts.  Fortunately it is less of an issue, since
the equivalent of the encoding vector (cmap) in TT fonts maps
to sequential number of `glyf' program in the font file rather than
to a glyph names

Regards, Berthold.